John Sandford - Mad River

“We got some media on the way,” Duke said. “We need to figure out who’s going to talk.”

“Not me,” Virgil said. “We usually leave that to you elected guys.”

Duke nodded. “Good enough. What are you going to do?”

“Just wait,” Virgil said. “There’s not much more to do. They’ll pop up, sooner or later. Probably sooner. Tomorrow. I just pray to God they don’t kill anyone else.”

“What do you think about that?”

“I think there’s a good chance that they will,” Virgil said. “I think there’s a good chance that they already have-they parked that truck in somebody’s garage, and that somebody is already dead, and they’re on their way to Los Angeles.”

“Now what?”

Virgil said, “Well, I’m here. I think I’ll go talk to a couple of O’Learys. The other guy who got killed. . Emmett Williams? You know where I’d find his people?”

“His sister lives here, he was staying with her. I’ll get her address if you want it, but that looked to us like a killing of opportunity. They were running and he just got in the way and got shot down. I don’t think there’s much in it, for you.”

“Probably not,” Virgil agreed. “But what else am I gonna do?”

Virgil got addresses for the O’Learys and Williams’s sister, and got them spotted on a city map by the sheriff’s secretary. The O’Learys lived out from the center of town, on a ridge overlooking the river; Williams’s sister, whose name was LuAnne Rogers, lived in an apartment building on the edge of the downtown, a few blocks from the courthouse. Virgil drove over, parked in front of a hardware store, and walked back across the street. Rogers’s apartment was over a bridal and prom dress shop. Virgil climbed the stairs and knocked on the door.

The door was opened by a small boy, maybe five. “Your mom home?” Virgil asked.

A woman called, “Just a minute,” and Virgil heard dishes clattering, and then a lanky good-looking black woman came to the door, carrying a dish towel, and asked, “Can I help you?”

“I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I want to chat with you about your brother, if you’re Miz Rogers.”

“Yeah, I am. Come in.”

Virgil stepped inside, and the woman said to the boy, “You go on and play your game. I’m putting you on the watch, one half hour.”

The boy scuttled away, and the woman said, “He’s got a Wii skateboard game.”

Virgil said he was sorry about her brother, and asked if she knew, or if any of her friends might know, if there was any connection between Williams and Sharp, Welsh, or McCall.

“That’s the first time I ever heard those names,” she said. “You know who did it?”

Virgil said, “Maybe. We’re looking for three young people, two men and a woman. You’ll be hearing about it on TV.”

“I don’t allow much TV in here,” she said. “And if I don’t allow Brad to watch it, I can’t watch myself. But I guess I’ll make an exception.”

She said again that she hadn’t heard of any of the three. “Emmett was here for two weeks, and he was going back home next week. He really didn’t have time to meet anybody up here.”

“Where’s home?”

“Kansas City. He’d been hassled around by his ex-wife down there, and he came up here to get away for a while. Then. .” She teared up a bit, and wiped the tears away. “Emmett and I weren’t real close. He was seven years younger than I am, and. . we just weren’t that close.”

She said her husband, Bradley Senior, was a plant engineer who installed computer-assisted wood-cutting machines and designed production lines, and was doing that at a local furniture factory. They’d been in town for six months and would be there for another three, and then would move on to the next job.

They talked about Emmett, and about growing up in Kansas City. Virgil decided after a few minutes that she had no real information. When he stood up to leave, she said, “I hate to ask you this, because this is all so terrible. . but, our car?”

“I’ll try to get it back to you quick as we can,” Virgil said. “I just can’t promise when that’ll be. Do you have some other way to get around?”

“The company rented us a car, but we’d like to get our own back. It’s pretty new.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Virgil promised.

Rogers had been straightforward about her distance from her brother, and though she was saddened and depressed by the killing, she was dealing with it. The O’Learys were a different matter.

Marsha O’Leary, Ag’s mother, was still in the hospital, suffering from exhaustion. Her husband, John, was at home when Virgil arrived, taking a break from the hospital vigil, replaced by Marsha’s mother. The surviving daughter, Mary, and four sons, Jack, James, Rob, and Frank, were scattered around a large living room and dining room. Jack was playing light jazz on an upright piano, sounding quite a bit like Harry Connick Jr. Virgil could imagine sitting on the front porch on a moonlit night, spooning with a young neighborhood lady, while Jack’s piano tune trickled through the screen door. .

Virgil had called ahead, and Mary had met him at the door. She was a square-shouldered young woman of medium height, probably not yet twenty, with dark hair and large, dark, direct eyes, wearing two sparkly diamond studs at her ears. She had dark circles at her eyes and her nose was red, from crying. She was wearing a green blouse and jeans.

John was sitting in an easy chair in the living room, and the four boys came in as Mary introduced Virgil to her father. All of them had curly dark hair, conservatively cut, with dark eyes and broad shoulders. They were a bunch of good-looking, athletic Irishmen in sweatshirts and jeans and moccasins, with an easy air of money about them; and an ugly bitter air of tragedy.

“Why did this happen?” John O’Leary asked. “We’re the nicest goddamn people on the face of the earth.”

Virgil shook his head. “I’d tell you that it happens all the time, except that it doesn’t. It’s pretty rare,” Virgil said. “Random killings are just. . incomprehensible. We’ve got an idea now who did it, two or three loser kids from Shinder. They apparently knew your name, knew you were well-off. . they got desperate. That’s what we think.”

He told them what he knew about Sharp, Welsh, and McCall, and the oldest three of the boys knew of Sharp and Welsh, and vaguely remembered McCall. “Didn’t really know them,” said Jack. “Jimmy Sharp was a year behind me and a year ahead of Jim, I think.”

Jim nodded and said, “That’s right. Becky was a year younger than me. Everybody said she was kind of a punchboard, but I never knew her well enough to know that. McCall was in there somewhere. He was one of those guys you don’t remember very well. . kind of joked around, but the jokes were always pretty lame. Maybe he was in the same grade as Becky? I don’t know. You think they really did it?”

“It looks that way,” Virgil said. “It’s possible that it’s McCall and two others, and they killed Mr. Sharp and Mr. and Mrs. Welsh because McCall knew them. . but I think it’s probably Sharp. And Becky Welsh.”

The three older O’Leary boys were in college-Jack in medical school, the other two in pre-med, all at the University of Minnesota. Mary was a senior in high school, Frank a sophomore. Ag had been the oldest of them, and, they said, probably had not known any of the suspected killers.

Frank said, “If Ag had gone to med school instead of getting married, none of this would have happened. If she hadn’t had that temper, if she’d just been quiet. .” And he sobbed once, stuck a knuckle in his mouth and turned away, and his father patted him on the shoulder.